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—Dahr Jamail

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—Peter Kuznick, professor of history, American University, and coauthor, with Oliver Stone, of The Untold History of the United States

“The staff of Project Censored presents their annual compilation of the previous year’s 25 stories most overlooked by the mainstream media along with essays about censorship and its consequences. The stories include an 813% rise in hate and anti-government groups since 2008, human rights violations by the US Border Patrol, and Israeli doctors injecting Ethiopian immigrants with birth control without their consent. Other stories focus on the environment, like the effects of fracking and Monsantos GMO seeds. The writers point out misinformation and outright deception in the media, including CNN relegating factual accounts to the “opinion” section and the whitewashing of Margaret Thatcher’s career following her death in 2013, unlike Hugo Chavez, who was routinely disparaged in the coverage following his death. One essay deals with the proliferation of “Junk Food News,” in which “CNN and Fox News devoted more time to ‘Gangnam Style’ than the renewal of Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ law.” Another explains common media manipulation tactics and outlines practices to becoming a more engaged, free-thinking news consumer or even citizen journalist. Rob Williams remarks on Hollywood’s “deep and abiding role as a popular propaganda provider” via Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. An expose on working conditions in Chinese Apple factories is brutal yet essential reading. This book is evident of Project Censored’s profoundly important work in educating readers on current events and the skills needed to be a critical thinker.”
-Publisher’s Weekly said about Censored 2014 (Oct.)

“Censored 2014 is a clarion call for truth telling. Not only does this volume highlight fearless speech in fateful times, it connect the dots between the key issues we face, lauds our whistleblowers and amplifies their voices, and shines light in the dark places of our government that most need exposure.”
–Daniel Ellsberg, The Pentagon Papers

3. Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk

October 2, 2010

Following in the steps of its predecessor, the Obama administration is expanding mass government surveillance of personal electronic communications. This surveillance, which includes the monitoring of the Internet as well as private (nongovernmental) computers, is proceeding with the proposal or passage of new laws granting government agencies increasingly wider latitude in their monitoring activities. At the same time, private companies and even some schools are engaging in surveillance activities that further diminish personal privacy.

In spring 2009, Senate Bill 773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, was proposed, which gives the president power to “declare a cyber security emergency” with respect to private computer networks, and to do with these networks what it deems necessary to diffuse the attack. In a national emergency, the president would also have the power to completely shut down the Internet in the US. The proposal requires that certain private computer systems and networks be “managed” by “cyberprofessionals” licensed by the federal government. The bill permits the president to direct the national response to the cyber threat if necessary for national defense and security; to conduct “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical to national security; and to require these companies to “share” information requested by the federal government.

Such steps toward increased control over private computer networks have been taken amid an ongoing program of mass surveillance begun by the George W. Bush administration supposedly in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. In January 2002, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) established the Information Awareness Office (IAO) to “imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness.”Under the Bush administration, such surveillance technology was developed and subsequently deployed through major US telecommunication and Internet service providers (ISPs) to conduct mass, warrantless dragnets of all domestic and international electronic traffic passing through switches in the US. This technology includes so-called “deep packet inspection” (DPI) technology, which employs sophisticated algorithms to parse all Internet contents (data, voice, and video), searching for key words such as “rebel” or “grenade.”

Presently no legislation exists that disallows use of such technology to conduct mass, warrantless surveillance. In fact, in January 2009, as David Karvets reported in Wired, the Obama administration sided with the Bush administration by asking a federal judge to set aside a ruling that kept alive a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration’s authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Moreover, amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed in 2008—and voted for by then Senator Obama—had already made it possible for the federal government to conduct such information dragnets without warrants. The 2008 FISA amendments also require electronic communication service providers such as AT&T and Verizon to “immediately provide the Government with all information, facilities, or assistance necessary to accomplish the [intelligence] acquisition,” while granting these companies retroactive and prospective immunity against civil suits, state investigations, and criminal prosecution.

In addition, in April 2009, the Obama Justice Department invoked the “state secrets privilege” to bar American citizens from suing the US government for illegally spying on them. It also went even further than the Bush administration by arguing that the US government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying and can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy laws.

The federal government is also presently increasing its capacity to analyze the massive sea of data on the Internet. As part of an effort to gather more “open source intelligence,” the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is investing in Visible Technologies, a data-mining company that analyzes the content of social media Web sites. Visible Technologies, which has offices in New York, Seattle, and Boston, was created in 2005, and in 2006 it developed a partnership with WPP, a worldwide communications firm. This company has the capacity to examine over half a million sites per day.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also resorted to using federal court subpoenas to try to gain access to private, online information. On January 30, 2009, IndyMedia, an alternative online news source, received a subpoena from the Southern District of Indiana Federal Court for the “IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information” of all the site’s visitors on June 25, 2008. IndyMedia was then prohibited from notifying visitors of this release of otherwise private and protected information because disclosure “would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law.” IndyMedia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) challenged the order and the subpoena was eventually dropped.

The Obama administration is also currently working with a group of UN nations on the development of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), “a new intellectual property enforcement treaty” to prevent illegal downloading and copying of songs, movies, pictures, and other legally protected Web content. The new law is being developed in secrecy and might allow government access to personal content on hard drives thought to be in breach of copyright. On November 3, 2009, nations participating in negotiations on the proposed law met in Seoul, South Korea, for a closed discussion of “enforcement in the digital realm.” According to a leaked memo from the conference, the US is pushing for a three-strikes/graduated-response policy and proactive policing of ISPs to ensure that any digital copyright infringements are caught, stopped, and punished.

In addition to the current trend of government surveillance, private employers are also reading employees’ e-mails, eavesdropping on their telephone calls, monitoring their Internet access, and watching them through the use of hidden cameras. Millions of workers carry company-issued cell phones, which are equipped with a global positioning system (GPS). The technology required to track cell phones is inexpensive (costing only five dollars per month for round-the-clock surveillance of an employee) and is readily available.

Company-issued laptops are also being monitored. Companies usually permit their employees to use such computers for personal purposes as well as for business. However, unbeknownst to the employees, all their private files (such as e-mails, photographs, and financial records) are being inspected by company techs when the computers are brought in for upgrades or repairs. Consequently, anything the techs deem questionable can be disclosed to management. Further, if the company-issued laptop has a webcam, the employer can use it to eavesdrop on the employee, even if he or she is in the bathroom.

Such clandestine use of computer webcams has not been limited to private companies spying on their employees. In one recent case, a suburban Philadelphia school district issued laptops to its students and secretly installed software that allowed school administrators to spy on the students.

As electronic surveillance technologies continue to improve, in the absence of laws to regulate their use and government watchdogs to ensure that these laws are followed, privacy in the digital age will predictably continue to decline.

Update by Liz Rose at Free Press

Deep packet inspection is a technology that gives corporations unprecedented control over Internet communications. It’s the same technology that allows Iran and other countries to try to stifle Internet freedom. The use of DPI is now pervasive and has spread to next-generation wireless networks. In this country, the adoption of DPI means that the telephone and cable companies that provide Internet service can monitor, inspect, and block Internet traffic, posing a serious threat to the open Internet.

There are two major developments in this story:

Major telecommunications companies (including Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, RCN, and COX) have now purchased DPI technology. Because of this investment, and because the technology has now been applied to wireless communications, the industry’s control over the Internet is increasing. The latest generation of DPI enables companies to monitor and ultimately to charge people for every use of an Internet connection.Free Press filed ten pages of comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about DPI. See pages 141 to 151 of our comments in the Net Neutrality proceeding on January 14, 2010 (http://www.freepress.net/node/76101). Free Press also released a paper titled “Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It” by Josh Silver, in March 2009, before the Democracy Now! story, “Deep Packet Inspection: Telecoms Aided Iran Government to Censor Internet Technology Widely Used in US,” ran, and it provides evidence of the threat posed by corporations having the power to inspect, block, and choke traffic on the Internet: (see http://www.freepress.net/files/Deep_Packet_Inspection _The_End_of _the_Internet_As_We_Know_It.pdf).

On April 6, 2010, a federal court ruled that the FCC does not have the authority under the jurisdiction that it claimed to stop Comcast—or any company—from blocking or choking Internet traffic. So right now, there is no recourse when a company does abuse its power over online communications. The FCC has indicated that it may move ahead and try to reassert its authority to set rules of the road for the Internet, but most observers think it will be a long battle ahead over the jurisdictional issues as well as over any possible rules.

This page appears to recieve a great deal of visitors. How do you get traffic to it? It gives a nice unique spin on things. I guess having something real or substantial to post about is the most important thing.

Adding to the surveillance of corporate and governmental computers, there has been a recent spat of elementary school districts issuing mandatory laptops to students which covertly snapped pictures and video of the students at specific times of the day (or night) to make sure that they were being used properly. This ended up “accidentally” recording young children in various states of undress in their bedrooms and the districts were taken to court. I believe that this was deemed illegal and the monitoring software was deactivated.

Also, The US government under NSA, DHS, FBI, and ICE has been taking over and censoring domain names in the US that they claim contribute to either copyright infringement or child pornography with no warrants or judicial orders and no recourse for the domain name owners. These actions were called Operation In Our Sites 1 & 2 respectively. Operation In Our Sites 2 targeted suspected child pornography sites and took down over 80,000 domain names. Most of the sites were found to be censored by mistake as they had no child pornography hosted on them but they were still blocked and their domain redirected to a government banner which cited the law against child pornography and accused the site of hosting such material. This caused irreparable harm to innocent websites.

Congressman Wyden of Oregon has been one of the only critics of such agency actions and has made good corroboratory comments on the topic.

People might as well realize that the entire digital world has back doors designed into it which can be called across frameworks, splash screens, protocols and even kernel level and machine level compilation to create undetectable threading, from literally hundreds of millions of lines of compilation and scripts.

So the “hackers” you see are BS in many cases, merely running commands and multi-routines, timed and automated depending on the purpose with even access well beyond the public port or firewall illusion straight into the operating apps of some of the biggest software publishers, and others developed in their languages, frameworks and distributions.

A pre-decided, designed and funded intelligence hoax job like Google, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are total convenient intelligence for free handy suckers bait we all use, based on a glamorized story for us gullible as easy to believe as super stardom of an actor or rock band.

It’s all a given from those with the bucks, the knowledge, the network, and the time to push it like a formula on someone else’s talent like the Gates stooge, on a too needed to fail intelligence slush fund which sets up these dweebs like independent astronauts who flew to the moon by themselves AND built the rocket.

Then as more promotionals, they make more fictional, contrived movies and shows with plenty of drama, soft pron and xtc with their picked sole developers geeking talking head for the talk show circuit as if this was budding Microsoft, Gates, “borrowed” and authored code in those days of 1980.

It’s not, Google, and Even a Facebook requires huge architectures of hardware, sitting in “clouds” and many developers way beyond the scope of one dummy portrayed as a billionaire and freak geek of nature to sucker in more of the gullible, for more commerce but especially free intelligence and profiling usage.

Freak-geeks like Assange are other paid multiplicity moles, doing stuff that any Japanese student, with interest and Flair pen and a napkin could pseudo code in multiplicity in 3 days, and also build an over-night success, in an already determined intelligence niche, with 40 developers, and a million a month hardware and free development budget above and beyond the brain fuel, as directed by the guy with the black cigar. The days of the rocket science innovation are over, the days of an army of internet e-aerospace engineers is where it is at today, these are not one man jobs, but one or two, three man concepts, turned into Google’s by NWO intelligence funding and planning.

The point is all these “hacking” pre-feeds and mental pepperings of premonition to the public and all the pre-arranged gullibility and convenient lack of knowledge, is to further goals of but more pretext for various wars and sorties, at the most for a literal war, but in the meantime to surveill, extort, borrow, study and profile corporations globally, groups and individuals, and everything in between and around, for free! and often “volunteered” information!, from a manual of command operations as easily run and automated as running a search query in Google, not relentless hacking, straight in and out, or whatever.

The “hacker” groups and “cracker” stories are another pure BS lie. Yes of course there are some independents, but these big hacks are controlled digital rapes and demolitions leading to something much bigger and widespread later, and it was pre-designed for this purpose with more options for accessible backdoor exploitation than these rat and deceiver handlers will need, the rest of the teams are just compartmentalized software ready and knowledgeable digital soldiers, on prepared sorties and routines, not some masterminds into something with a million holes anyways, when you know where they are before you get there.

And they don’t even need a hard connection into your system, or your Microwave oven or automobile’s system either, it can be wireless, and even invasive wireless, but that’s another article. It’ll go satellite in due time, the other guys satellites, if you know what I mean, or his farmed spaces in space places.

People might as well realize that the entire digital world has back doors designed into it which can be called across frameworks, splash screens, protocols and even kernel level and machine level compilation to create undetectable threading, from literally hundreds of millions of lines of compilation and scripts.

So the “hackers” you see are BS in many cases, merely running commands and multi-routines, timed and automated depending on the purpose with even access well beyond the public port or firewall illusion straight into the operating apps of some of the biggest software publishers, and others developed in their languages, frameworks and distributions.

A pre-decided, designed and funded intelligence hoax job like Google, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are total convenient intelligence for free handy suckers bait we all use, based on a glamorized story for us gullible as easy to believe as super stardom of an actor or rock band.

It’s all a given from those with the bucks, the knowledge, the network, and the time to push it like a formula on someone else’s talent like the Gates stooge, on a too needed to fail intelligence slush fund which sets up these dweebs like independent astronauts who flew to the moon by themselves AND built the rocket.

Then as more promotionals, they make more fictional, contrived movies and shows with plenty of drama, soft pron and xtc with their picked sole developers geeking talking head for the talk show circuit as if this was budding Microsoft, Gates, “borrowed” and authored code in those days of 1980.

It’s not, Google, and Even a Facebook requires huge architectures of hardware, sitting in “clouds” and many developers way beyond the scope of one dummy portrayed as a billionaire and freak geek of nature to sucker in more of the gullible, for more commerce but especially free intelligence and profiling usage.

Freak-geeks like Assange are other paid multiplicity moles, doing stuff that any Japanese student, with interest and Flair pen and a napkin could pseudo code in multiplicity in 3 days, and also build an over-night success, in an already determined intelligence niche, with 40 developers, and a million a month hardware and free development budget above and beyond the brain fuel, as directed by the guy with the black cigar. The days of the rocket science innovation are over, the days of an army of internet e-aerospace engineers is where it is at today, these are not one man jobs, but one or two, three man concepts, turned into Google’s by NWO intelligence funding and planning.

The point is all these “hacking” pre-feeds and mental pepperings of premonition to the public and all the pre-arranged gullibility and convenient lack of knowledge, is to further goals of but more pretext for various wars and sorties, at the most for a literal war, but in the meantime to surveill, extort, borrow, study and profile corporations globally, groups and individuals, and everything in between and around, for free! and often “volunteered” information!, from a manual of command operations as easily run and automated as running a search query in Google, not relentless hacking, straight in and out, or whatever.

The “hacker” groups and “cracker” stories are another pure BS lie. Yes of course there are some independents, but these big hacks are controlled digital rapes and demolitions leading to something much bigger and widespread later, and it was pre-designed for this purpose with more options for accessible backdoor exploitation than these rat and deceiver handlers will need, the rest of the teams are just compartmentalized software ready and knowledgeable digital soldiers, on prepared sorties and routines, not some masterminds into something with a million holes anyways, when you know where they are before you get there.

And they don’t even need a hard connection into your system, or your Microwave oven or automobile’s system either, it can be wireless, and even invasive wireless, but that’s another article. It’ll go satellite in due time, the other guys satellites, if you know what I mean, or his farmed spaces in space places.

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